Ottawa Watch

Thursday, February 05, 2015

Reviews of Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper's Assault on Your Right to Know

by Mark Bourrie

The book paints Harper as ruthlessly attacking and even silencing journalists, scientists, judges, environmentalists, and intellectuals in a drive to remake Canada, rewrite our history, and keep the Conservatives in power. It is one of the most damning books ever written about a sitting prime minister.

-Paul Gessell, Ottawa Magazine

In thirteen searing chapters, Bourrie details the Harper government's politics-as-war crusade to "to kill many messengers" by blocking media inquiries, gagging watchdogs (especially climate scientists), shuttering archives and laboratories, and ramping up conservative propaganda — all in the service of relegating politics to well-connected insiders. How readers feel about Bourrie's book will no doubt hinge on their personal politics, but he certainly makes some valid points in this razor-witted, accessible account that should interest anyone who cares about Canada's future.

--Publishers Weekly

People are either going to love this book or hate it. Me, I loved it. Stephen Harper may not like it so much but would do well to heed it.

-Georgie Binks, Toronto Star

A sweeping and sobering read.

-Susan Delacourt, Toronto Star

Some of the book’s most valuable sections illustrate how the kind of control applied to the media and the public sphere is being applied to policy-making – think the dismantling of the long-gun registry, cancelling the long-form census, or ignoring declining crime rates when crafting new justice legislation. If you are determined to pass certain kinds of laws, then suppressing the flow of information about how effective the laws are will make them more difficult to criticize.

-Chis Hannay, the Globe and Mail

Examining a Parliament now micromanaged by party whips, MPs who see no reason to attend the House of Commons to debate bills, and a media seemingly no longer able or willing to report on Parliament Hill in scrupulous detail or with a critical lens, Kill the Messengers paints a portrait of a democracy that's hobbled or, as Bourrie puts it, "on autopilot."

-Thomas Hachard, The Tyee

The most important and interesting parts of this book deal with how the prime minister and his staff have been able to manage and manipulate their message, taking advantage of key changes in the way the news media operates. Especially important is that Bourrie, a veteran member of the Parliamentary press gallery, does not refrain from assigning at least some of the blame to the media itself.

-Dan Rowe, Quill and Quire

Kill The Messengers is funny and unnerving. Bourrie takes aim… with a sniper’s precision. The result is the gutsiest account of contemporary Canadian politics to come out of the parliamentary press gallery in a generation.

-Holly Doan, Blacklock’s ReporterMark Bourrie's thorough examination of how Stephen Harper keeps the Canadian voter from knowing what the hell is going on, how it muzzles government scientists and everyone else in the civil service, should infuriate everyone who has even the slightest regard for democracy, transparency and open government. The book is also an indictment of a lazy media. Harper has gotten away with a lot because the media has allowed it to happen. The book is wonderfully written. Breezy, very funny at times, but ultimately maddening. I hope everyone who plans to vote in the 2015 federal election ion Canada reads it.-- Linwood Barclay, Goodreads.Bourrie correctly identifies the most dangerous precedents Harper has set: Trying to appoint an unqualified judge to the Supreme Court; trying to change the law to make his illegal appointment legal; and publicly rebuking the chief justice of the Supreme Court for trying to tell him he was wrong."There's no point having a free press, functioning Parliament, independent parliamentary watchdogs, unfettered scientists and an end to government propaganda campaigns unless we have free elections and courts that have the power to roll back tyranny," Bourrie pleads."If we lose those, it's all over. They won't be coming back."

True Canadian conservatives support Parliament and democratic traditions. Bourrie is so convinced of the undemocratic tendencies of Harper, that he twice uses the label "fascism" to describe his true ideology.Readers will decide for themselves if Bourrie has overreached, or is accurately depicting Canada's emperor/prime minister as having no democratic clothes.

After all, there's always the next election.

Isn't there?

--Donald Benham, Winnipeg Free PressBy the time you have read chapters five through 10, you will be ready for an election. Even those of conservative ideology should be moved by the cost of Harper’s misguided decisions and the fact that his efforts to control the narrative have caused him to break every pledge of accountability on which he originally campaigned.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Time to buy a new Snoopy lunch pail. I heard a couple of months ago that I've been admitted to the University of Ottawa's Common Law program, beginning in September. I was able to tell my dad that before he passed away.It's something I always wanted to do. I wrote about a lot of legal stuff, and I've wished, over the years, that I had studied law before I wrote any of it. I want to be a go-to lawyer for writers, publishers, people hit by SLAPP suits, and new Internet media start-ups. Fortunately, the University of Ottawa, just down the street from my home, has the faculty and resources to teach me how to do that.Yea, it's weird to go back to school at an age when people are seriously considering early retirement. But idleness never had much attraction for me. And I've seen an awful lot of people in mid-life thrive in law school. Getting a law degree takes nothing away from what I do as an author, university teacher or historian. And, in 2017, when I graduate, I'll be three years older. That would have happened without law school.So wish me luck. It's going to be a big change.

Sunday, March 02, 2014

Paul Bourrie died peacefully on February 28 in Smith’s
Falls, Ontario. He had just celebrated his 83d birthday.

He was the son of Ernest Bourrie and (Ellen) Bernadine
Lehane, and the brother of Michael Bourrie, all of whom predeceased him. He was
also very close to his aunts Mary and Anne Lehane of Toronto.

Mr. Bourrie was born on February 2, 1931, in Lindsay,
Ontario and spent most of his childhood at his parents’ home in Midland and on
his great-grandmother Elizabeth Donnelly’s farm near Brechin.

He married Margaret Anne Gilman in 1954.

In his teens, Mr. Bourrie worked as a bellhop and bootlegger
on the Canadian Pacific passenger ships Assiniboia and Keewatin and attended
St. Jerome’s College in Kitchener, where he excelled in boxing. After working
for several years for the Toronto brokerage firm of Ross Knowles, he graduated
from Lakeshore Teacher’s College. He later studied economics at Waterloo
Lutheran University ( Wilfrid Laurier University).

Mr. Bourrie taught in Toronto, New Hamburg, Collingwood,
Midland, Northwestern Ontario and Nassau, Bahamas. He specialized in teaching
youths who struggled with reading, and, in the last years of his teaching
career, worked with First Nations children in the Nakina area north of Lake
Superior.

Mr. Bourrie was a founding member of the New Democratic
Party. He was on the executives of several riding associations in the Kitchener
area and in Northwestern Ontario. He was always keenly interested in public
affairs.

He was an avid trout fisherman, like his father.

Mr. Bourrie is survived by his children Pauline (Robert
Woodruff), Mark (Marion Van de Wetering), and Mary Anne (Henri Morin), and by
grandchildren Max, Carina, Caitlin and Melissa Morin, Megan, Ian and Maia
Bourrie, and Lindsay and Sara Woodruff.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

In
the past, politicians could be adversaries in civil debates without being
enemies. They could reject each other’s arguments without attacking them as
people. They could debate facts and lines of logic with vigor and humor,
without the vicious mockery and, more and more, outright profanity that’s heard
in the House of Commons. They could quibble over their interests without
attacking their opponents’ patriotism. Canada’s Parliament has never been an
academy of selfless Solons tirelessly reflecting on the public good. Six years
after Confederation, a journalist wrote: “At Ottawa, little enough is done in
the way of practical legislation for the country, but the struggle of parties
is carried on vigorously, with a shrill accompaniment of organs on both sides.”
Still, there was a sense of collegiality, perhaps inspired by the fact that
Ottawa was a forlorn place and the city was awash in booze.

Now politics is seen as war by another means,
with control of patronage and public spending as the prize. In places where
politicians look on each other as enemies, “legislatures replace relevance with
pure partisanship. Party discipline rules supreme, fraternization is frowned
upon, negotiation and compromise are rarely practiced, and debate within the
chamber becomes as venomously personal as it is politically meaningless,”
Ignatieff told his American audience.

And
when political opponents – or any other group -- are cast as enemies of the
popular interest, it’s not much of a leap to label them as enemies of the people and enemies of the state: Anne Coulter, the American
right-wing controversialist, has made a good living doing precisely that,
peddling books attacking liberals, giving the books titles like Treason, Demonic, Guilty, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors. “Fascism
took the fatal step from a politics of adversaries into a politics of enemies,”
Ignatieff, still hurting from his own electoral beating, warned. “We are not
there yet, but it is worth remembering that the fatal declension occurred in a
democracy not so dissimilar to our own, in a society plagued by economic
crisis, among a battered population looking for someone to blame.”

Democratic
politics requires compromise, often a dirty business that can shock and horrify
those of us who rarely find the need to hold our noses and make deals with
people we don’t particularly like, don’t agree with, and want to see fail. It’s
one of the skills that lawyers need, which partly explains why lawyers move so
easily into political life. But today’s “politics as war” conjures up ingrained
concepts of unconditional surrender, scorched earth, take no prisoners, and
divides outcomes into victory or defeat. The idea of compromise for the good of
the public disappears pretty fast. High-functioning sociopaths flourish in this
environment.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The King of England stood on a
balcony in Westminster, just outside the city of London, and braced himself
against the cold. It was a raw January day in 1649, the crowd was noisy, and
only a few people could hear him.

But there was a guy near the king
who was writing everything down. With a few hours, the king’s speech was on the
streets in primitive newspapers.

It
was not the sort of rant that Justin Trudeau or even Stephen Harper would come
up with, and it certainly was not the work of a Barrack Obama. King Charles I
wasn’t running for anything. In fact, his career was quickly winding down. The
words he spoke were his own, not those of a speechwriter. They’re sort of dense
and Shakespearean, but after you read them once or twice, you’ll get the drift.

“And truly I desire their (the
people’s) liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever, but I must tell
you, that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws
by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having
a share in government that is pertaining to them,” the diminutive, cat-like sovereign
said.

“A subject and a sovereign are clean
different things, and therefore until you do put the people in that liberty as
I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.”

He finished up, turned, knelt down,
prayed for a moment, and a chap named Brandon took one swing of an axe and
chopped off his head.

Few politicians are as up-front in
their contempt of democracy, and fewer still have the opportunity to speak with
the honesty that’s available to a sentient person who knows he won’t have to
worry about that evening’s dinner because he’ll be shorter by a head. But
Charles I was a man of his times, and of our times, too: trashing the press,
proroguing parliament, getting very heavy with people who disagreed. Few modern
politicians will come out and say the people really have no business being
involved in government. A few more will echo the king’s assertion that
governments exist to protect people’s property and keep taxes down. But not
that many are willing to stick their necks that far out to make a point.

Two hundred years later, the
Americans fought their own Civil War. This one was about crushing secessionist
states that had broken up the country because they believed their slave economy
was in jeopardy. But this war was about something else, the thing that lies in
the heart of the Gettysburg Address. Everyone’s heard of that short speech – it
wasn’t much longer than poor Charles’s last words – but few people have read it
carefully. The address starts with a little history lesson and a very slight
side-swipe of the slavery issue. Then it gets down to business: the blood of
the Union troops at Gettysburg was spilled so that government of the people, by
the people, for the people, should not perish from this earth.

People reading the speech always put
the emphasis on the “of, by, for” words. But the real meat of the phrase is in
the last six words. In 1863, the United States was the most revolutionary
country on Earth. It was the only major power that was anything resembling a
real democracy. And it seemed likely to be the last one, an experiment that
failed. France had twice tried to create a democracy between 1789 and 1863 and
their revolutions went badly. One ended up bathed in blood. Both were
undermined by public revulsion and ended with a return to monarchy. Britain was
emerging as democratic state, but few men had the right to vote and power lay
in the hands of aristocrats and industrialists. Canada was a little farther
along, but most politicians gagged at the idea of true democracy. Anti-democratic
feeling ran strong among members of Canada’s elites, many of them linear
descendants of monarchist refugees from the American Revolution. They feared
the political power of French-Canadians and the Irish who were streaming into
the country, and many remembered the fun time they had crushing the Rebellions
of 1837-1838.

The great empires and small
countries of Europe were all monarchies. Revolutionaries in central and South
America had overthrown their Spanish colonial masters and had tried to create
democracies. All had failed. There were no democracies in Africa. Or Asia. Or, for
that matter, in the Confederacy.

Democracy was an anomaly until the
end of the First World War. Going into it, the Great Powers consisted of four
Imperial monarchies (Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Japan), two
democracies (France and the United States), a new junta trying to secularize an
Islamic state (Turkey) and a parliamentary monarchy that was well on its way to
being a democracy (Britain). Most of the rest of the small industrialized
powers were military dictatorships, ludicrous small monarchies (the Tsar of
Bulgaria comes to mind), colonies or satellite nations of the larger powers. Canada
was both a colony and an emerging democracy). By the end of the war, democracy
or systems resembling it had been foisted on most of the new European countries
created by the Treaty of Versailles and on Central Powers. The postwar
settlement of 1919 was a rush forward for democracy in Europe, though many nations
created in that settlement would not get much of a chance to act like one for
another seventy years.

After the Second World War,
democracy would get another boost, not just in Europe (outside the Soviet
occupation zones) but also in the Third World, where Britain tried, with
temporary and minimal success, to create Westminster systems in its old colonies.

So, in many ways, Lincoln, when he stood on
the platform at Gettysburg, was very much alone as the leader of what he feared
was the world’s last democracy. Democracy – real involvement by the people in
their government, which they, as citizens own -- is not the default position of
governments, even in the West. It’s something that takes great struggle to
create and has to be nurtured, preserved, and, in dire times, fought for. As we’ve
seen in the misfire of the “Arab Spring,” faith in democracy and in the civil
society institutions that protect it needs to be deep and wide in society.
Elections and political parties do not make democracy. It cannot survive with
without the rule of law – honest courts, enforceable agreements, fair treatment
of accused criminals – along with an inquisitive press and a solid, accessible
system of public education. State religions undermine democracy because they
enforce intellectual and social conformity. So does tribalism. Class warfare,
which does exist, can undermine democracy, too. People need the freedom to be
able to do business together in corporations, but they also need the liberty to
work together to form trade unions. Any country that has a huge gap between the
wealthy and the poor is so wracked with systemic inequality that the political voice
of the impoverished is too weak to be heard.

The fear of being the last, failed
steward of democracy drove Lincoln. Like Vladimir Lenin during the years when
the Communists were losing the Russian Civil War, Lincoln became ruthless. Believing
freedom could not, on its own, save democracy, he did not back away from
censoring the press. At one point, he even considered jailing the chief justice
of the United States Supreme Court, who was a die-hard pro-slavery,
states-rights man. In the end, once the rebellion had been crushed, Lincoln
quickly moved to restore state legislatures in Dixie and to bring congressmen
from the Confederate states to the newly-finished Capitol. Democracy of the
people, by the people, had been, as much as was possible in 19th
century America, saved from extinction.

Lincoln ended his life with a bullet
in the brain, but the idea of democracy as a practical system of government survived
both the war and Lincoln. Public support and the political will for real
democracy has ebbed and flowed, but the target was always there. Democracy has
many flaws, including the obvious fact that it’s very difficult for people to
listen to each other and to prevent the strong from dominating the weak. Still,
it is the system of government that offers people more freedom than any other.
In fact, democracy simply can’t work unless people have a deeply ingrained
sense of liberty, not only for their own thoughts, speech, and religion, but
for those they disagree with. Liberty of conscience unleashes all kinds of creativity
and inquiry, along with economic opportunity and social mobility. That’s one of
the reasons why democracies tend to be so wealthy.

But ideology of democracy, so taken
for granted in places that have benefitted from it, is in trouble, not just in
Canada, but in most Western countries. Corporate communications strategy,
retail politics, intrusive technology and the de-fanging of media and other governmental
watchdogs have become normal. Courts and the justice system are being
undermined, both from outside and from within. A new kind of controlling,
arrogant and often vindictive government has emerged since the 1980s and is
getting more emboldened and entrenched. It is not simply a neo-conservative
creation. It’s loose in Barack Obama’s Washington, where “hope” and “change”
did not involve the rolling back of the post-9/11 security state and the
opening up of government to scrutiny and criticism.

Here in Canada, Stephen
Harper, like Jean Chretien before him, relishes the idea of being a “G-8 world
leader.” Because Canada was invited to join the annual summit of world economic
powers – mainly because France got to bring Italy to the table, U.S. president
Gerald Ford insisted his country should bring Canada – Ottawa strangely sees
itself as a capital rivaling Paris, London and Tokyo. Really, although it’s a
great place to live, it’s a rather backwater capital of a very decentralized
state where power over important issues like education, health care, and social
services lies with the provinces. The importance – or self-importance – that
goes along with this pretence of Canada being a major world power was used as
an excuse for Harper’s security detail to transport an armored Cadillac to
India for one summit, as though there are no safe limos in the subcontinent, or
that anyone would recognize him if he walked down the street.

In
Ottawa, Harper has adopted a style that can only be termed lordly. He travels
to work in a motorcade of black limos and SUVs with tinted windows. They circle
Parliament Hill until a suitable, discrete entrance is found, far from the
curious tourists, and the Prime Minister and his retinue are whisked into the
Centre Block. John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau often walked
to work. It’s not clear why Ottawa is considered by Harper’s security people
believe Ottawa to be so dangerous. It could be that Harper has an intense fear of
assassination. Or maybe the motorcade is just a rather ridiculous symbol of
power. If Harper wants to use his business office, the same motorcade takes the
Prime Minister across Wellington Street to the big, ugly Langevin Block. The
nasty building was named after a newspaper editor who became a Public Works
minister and had his career destroyed by a kickback scandal. The sandstone building
is literally rotting along the street level because the stone is dissolved by
road salt. Inside, the halls of the Langevin Block are covered with photographs
of Stephen Harper.

Crash-proof
barriers have been installed at the Prime Minister’s mansion at 24 Sussex Drive
– which is also falling apart from neglect and shabby maintenance -- and the old
chef’s quarters have been turned into an RCMP security detail command centre.
(The Harpers and chefs have never really worked out. A previous chef quit and sued,
saying it was not part of his job to bury the Harper family’s dead cat, which
was flattened by a car.)

In
2013, when Prime Minister Harper took his teenage son Ben to the Centre Block’s
very informal fifth floor cafeteria for a burger, the Harpers were accompanied
by at least four skittish, bulky men with wires in their ears and a
photographer who snapped almost every second of that magic moment. Much
eye-rolling ensued. It must have been strange for the high schooler. It
certainly was for those of us who sat, eating out lunches, and watched. The
situation became comical as the security people filled the tiny cafeteria and
eyeballed the journalists, MPs, office workers and political staffers who sat
at the rows of cafeteria-style tables. There was no reason why the two Harpers
could not have quietly walked into the room, without the goons and
photographers, and sat down for lunch. But, in true Stephen Harper style,
father and son sat in a secluded corner of the room, protected by Prime
Ministerial staffers, heavies and photographers, and, rather than have a
low-key family moment, enjoyed a photo-op instead.

Then
there’s Halloween at the Harper house, called “24” in Tory code speak. Starting
in 2012, kids who want candy from the Harpers are put through metal detectors
first. As Gulliver found out, even the little people can make your life
miserable. Our G-8 country world-leader was kept safe from witches, pirates,
Darth Vaders and other sketchy small people, who arrived at his doorstep
disarmed and thoroughly screened, made to walk through airport-style metal
detectors.

If
you think this kind of nonsense is the brainchild of the security staff, and
that the PM has no say in how it works, think again. The Prime Minister is the
boss, and if he really thought the head of his RCMP security team was pushing
him around, that cop would, within a few weeks, be showing store clerks in
Iqaluit how to spot fake toonies. He likes this. He likes this far too much.

Of course, in a city full of enemies, kids packing plastic
light sabers and rubber pirate swords are the least of your worries if you’re
the Prime Minister of Canada. Harper and his courtiers spend a lot of time
worrying about enemies in the media, universities, bureaucracy, First Nations
and even in churches and soup kitchens. And, of course, there are the enemies
sitting on the other side of the House of Commons. Gone were the days of
grudging professional respect and sometimes real friendship among Members of
Parliament. The House of Commons stumbles toward irrelevance during the Harper regime
and the ever more toxic atmosphere and vicious partisanship has worked its way
down into the committees, where most of Parliament’s real work gets done. Whatever
people say about former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, by the time his
political career crashed he understood the danger of separating the people’s
representatives into “us” and “them,” and then trashing the “thems” as
unpatriotic, evil, stupid and corrupt. “The opposition performs an adversarial
function critical to democracy itself,” Ignatieff said in a speech at Stanford
University in October, 2012. “Governments have no right to question the loyalty
of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common
subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law.”

In
the past, politicians could be adversaries in civil debates without being
enemies. They could reject each other’s arguments without attacking them as
people. They could debate facts and lines of logic with vigor and humor,
without the vicious mockery and, more and more, outright profanity that’s heard
in the House of Commons. They could quibble over their interests without
attacking their opponents’ patriotism. But in places where politicians look on
each other as enemies, “legislatures replace relevance with pure partisanship.
Party discipline rules supreme, fraternization is frowned upon, negotiation and
compromise are rarely practiced, and debate within the chamber becomes as
venomously personal as it is politically meaningless,” Ignatieff told his
American audience.

And
when political opponents – or any other group -- are cast as enemies of the
popular interest, it’s not much of a leap to label them as enemies of the people and enemies of the state: Anne Coulter, the American
right-wing controversialist, has made a good living doing precisely that,
peddling books attacking liberals, giving the books titles like Treason, Demonic, Guilty, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors. “Fascism
took the fatal step from a politics of adversaries into a politics of enemies,”
Ignatieff, still hurting from his own electoral beating, warned. “We are not
there yet, but it is worth remembering that the fatal declension occurred in a
democracy not so dissimilar to our own, in a society plagued by economic
crisis, among a battered population looking for someone to blame.”

Democratic
politics requires compromise, often a dirty business that can shock and horrify
those of us who rarely find the need to hold our noses and make deals with
people we don’t particularly like, don’t agree with, and want to see fail. It’s
one of the skills that lawyers need, which partly explains why lawyers move so
easily into political life. But today’s “politics as war” conjures up ingrained
concepts of unconditional surrender, scorched earth, take no prisoners, and
divides outcomes into victory or defeat. The idea of compromise for the good of
the public disappears pretty fast. High-functioning sociopaths flourish in this
environment.

War
talk, Ignatieff said, should be saved for real enemies. “We should focus
martial energies where they are needed: [against] those adversaries who
actively threaten the liberty of other peoples and our own. Towards those
within our borders, however heatedly we may disagree, we should work from a
simple persuasive, but saving, assumption: In the house of democracy there are
no enemies.”

Ignatieff
said democracy is threatened while money dominated politics. And parties have
to loosen their grips on the nomination process so talented people who are
unknown to the central leadership can come forward. Elected representatives
have to be freed from party whips. Ignatieff had rarely worried about these
problems when he held the knout as leader of the Liberal Party, but he was
right.[i]

But
Ignatieff’s visions aren’t shared in the Langevin Block. Even Harper supporters
have not been immune to their leader’s thirst for control: Tom Flanagan,
Harper’s political and academic mentor, was driven out when he wrote Harper’s Team without clearing the book
with the boss. The prime minister had tried to talk Flanagan into killing the
book, which has very little controversial material and puts Harper in a fairly
good light. Flanagan later told author Lawrence Martin that Harper didn’t want
Flanagan to write any book, no matter how supportive it might be.

Flanagan himself, in a 2007 interview,
said the goal of Harper and the Tories was to change the very real perception
among Canadians that Liberal governments are normal and Conservative
administrations are just oddballs and flukes that last just long enough to
maintain the pretence that Canada is a two-party democracy. “The Liberals had
identified themselves as the party of government, people used to talk about the
natural governing party and all this bullshit. He’s (Harper) got a definite
communication strategy to associate the Conservative party with government and
make it seem normal to have a Conservative government after so many years in
which the Liberals made it seem that no other party than the Liberals could
govern. Conservative parties around the world tend to be successful when they
can align themselves with the values of patriotism. That’s the norm, that the
conservative party is the patriotic party.”[ii]

And
Flanagan had a point. Since the end of the First World War, Conservative federal
governments in Canada have been rare and relatively short-lived. Almost to the
day when Harper was sworn in, conventional wisdom, especially in the Parliament
Hill media, was that the Liberals were mathematically certain to hold power for
a very, very long time. Jeffrey Simpson, The
Globe and Mail’s main Ottawa columnist and the authoritative voice of
conventional wisdom for both the bureaucratic and media elites, even published
a book, The Friendly Dictatorship,
about the threat to democracy of the Liberals’ seemingly unbreakable lock on
power. If he had learned anything in the first years of the century, Harper had
discovered that every political party, even the Liberal Party of Canada --
which ranks as one of the world’s great political success stories -- can be humbled
and even broken. There is no “forever” in politics.

The
creation of the Conservative Party of Canada took more than a decade, and building
it required the co-opting of the Reform Party, a 1980s populist reaction to the
sleaze, deficit spending and regional compromises of Brian Mulroney’s
Progressive Conservatives. The people in Western Canada and rural and small-town Ontario
who supported Reform often had legitimate beefs. Starting in the 1970s, Canada
has been through a series of recessions that have hit farm country and small
towns particularly hard. Cities, riding real estate booms fuelled by immigration,
missed much of the pain. In many small communities, the tough recessions of the
early 1980s and early 1990s never ended. Many factories that were shut never
re-opened. Well-paying jobs in mills, mines, and on railways never came back.
The split from the 1980s onwards between the prosperity of the cities --
especially white collar Toronto -- and the depopulation and poverty in the
countryside and in resource communities –opened up enmities and political
opportunities that were far more effectively exploited by neo-conservatives.
Young people abandoned rural and small-town Canada, causing anguish and
bitterness for the parents they left behind. The aging of rural Canada was
another factor that helped Reform grow and pick up Parliamentary seats. At the
same time, Christianity split between dying older denominations and more
fundamentalist churches, and Manning, a conservative Christian, was able to
pull fellow evangelicals into his political crusade.

The conversation in Canada was muted by the
gutting of community journalism as independent small-town papers were absorbed
into national newspaper chains and ruined. Big city journalism abandoned
small-town Canada. The Globe and Mail
had built itself on regional distribution. It became the dominant political
newspaper in Ontario because its circulation department memorized railway
timetables and made sure every farmer, main street business owner and
small-town lawyer had the paper first thing in the morning. (The Globe’s creator, George Brown, made
his fortune in the 1850s by getting the paper to the train on time. George
McCullagh, founder of The Globe and Mail,
started in the newspaper business in the 1920s as a kid wandering the back
concessions of Ontario, betting farmers that he could plow a straighter furrow
than they could, with a Globe subscription
as the stakes.) The Globe and Mail
threw away farm and small-town readers and stopped covering most local and
provincial issues in a deliberate decision made in 1988. The ad industry lusted
for the urban, wealthy demographic, even if it’s not large enough to support a
great newspaper. People in the West and small-town Canada clued in quickly. No
one likes to feel unwanted.

Manning’s
greatest contribution to this country was actually a negative, He could have
exploited western separatist sympathies, but he didn’t. Instead, Reform would
storm Babylon, muck out the mess in Ottawa, make everyone from every part of
Canada equally important in Ottawa, get rid of careerist politicians and those
who lied to get elected, and have MPs who really represented their
constituents. If they let the people down, voters would be able to “recall”
them. It really was “reform” and much of it was, and still is, badly needed. Reform
Party supporters – politically-aware people from small-town Canada who are not
thrilled to see fundraising prowess and patronage take over the political
system – should be just as horrified as anyone else with what’s happening in
Ottawa.

Politics
is run by professional strategists, pollsters and fundraisers who usually work
for lobbying firms and sell their influence to the highest bidder between
elections. The professionalization of
politics, along with the Conservatives’ extreme message control, lack of accountability
and the almost complete ignoring of the “grass roots” until the party needs
some money or some votes runs completely opposite to what the Reform Party
stood for in the early 1990s.

Now,
former Reformers hold many of the levers of power. The West’s biggest economic
worries have been taken care of. Alberta’s energy sector is safe from high
taxation and tough regulations, and the government backs the pipelines that
could take Alberta crude to world markets. Farmers don’t have to sell their
grain to the Canadian Wheat Board. And, probably coincidentally, since not even
Stephen Harper can dictate the price of oil, most of the West is booming.
(Harper, though, should re-read the books of economist Harold Innis to see
where this is going. In a nutshell, Innis, a brilliant University of Toronto
economist, warned in 1956 that this country has, too often, relied on just one
or two big resource industries and has paid heavily when the world stopped
paying us the price we want.) But to win power, the party changed. Readers of
George Orwell’s Animal Farm will be
familiar with the story line. These days, the Conservative Party of Canada
bears a striking resemblance to the Mulroney-led party that Preston Manning
destroyed. It’s hard to believe old Reformers ever expected to see their party
defending Mulroney in the House of Commons for taking $300,000 in large bills
from German arms dealer-lobbyist Karl-Heinz Schreiber, with the utterly lame
response that the Liberals had skimmed millions through the Sponsorship scandal.
They never would have said, back when Manning was stumping prairie villages, that
Senate expense account padding wasn’t worth much public condemnation because
the Ontario Liberals were engaged in a succession of scandals, as though one
negates the other in some sort of weird hierarchy of corruption.

So
the message has to be controlled. The Harper government has set out to kill
many messengers. The media is obviously one of them. And, while Harper’s war
with journalists has generated some coverage and interest – though perhaps more
among journalists than other people – it’s just a small and relatively easy
part of the remaking of how Ottawa works. The Ottawa media had been withering
for years, battered by the collapse of the news business. There are many other
watchdogs in Ottawa, and Harper’s team set out to defang them, along with
anyone who made much noise about it.

First,
there was Parliament, an institution, like the media, that has seen better days
and has needed serious reform for a long time. Somewhere between Preston
manning’s 1980s speeches in rural Saskatchewan about democracy and the Harper
government’s decision to slap time limits on debate of most important bills,
someone didn’t get the message that MPs are supposed to be more than voting
puppets. (The status of legislators had already been undercut by Neo-cons,
who’ve pretty much erased the concept of “representative” from the public mind
and replaced it with “politician.” This type of propaganda was expressed quite
blatantly by the Conservative government of Neo-con darling Mike Harris. His
bill to scrap local democracy and replace small community councils with less
responsive amalgamated city administrations was called The Fewer Municipal Politicians Act, 1999. People might have looked
at it differently if it was called The
Reduced Representation Act or The
Kiss Local Democracy Goodbye Act. The Harper government has come up with
the same triumphal names for laws, which are talked about later in the book.)

Who
are the people that Harper wants muzzled? There are federal watchdogs who make
sure the government doesn’t waste money. They protect people’s civil rights.
They consult with environmental scientists and engineers to decide whether or
not a pipeline can be built safely. They inspect our food so we don’t get poisoned.
They make sure the government’s spies do not pry into the lives of law-abiding
people. Some of them were never, before Harper’s regime went after them, seen
as watchdogs at all. For example, very few people ten years ago would have
added environmental scientists to any list of people who might be considered
dangers to the state. Now, in Harper’s Ottawa, they’re kept isolated and gagged
and, if possible, turfed from their jobs. Their labs are shut down and their
research libraries shuttered. Everyone within the government’s grasp is barred
from speaking publicly in case they say something that might inconvenience or
embarrass the government. The national institutions paid for by Canadians are
to speak with just one voice, and it is linked to the mind of Stephen Harper,
an introverted former computer nerd with a master’s degree in economics, no
real experience in the world of business or professions, who never managed
anything in his life, other than a small and secretive pressure group called
the National Citizens Coalition, before winning the leadership of the
Conservative Party of Canada, and, within a few years, the premiership of
Canada.

A
lot of this controlling, targeting, and, when need arises, attacking, is done
to make life easier at “the centre” – the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which
is the political department run by Stephen Harper, and the Council Office
(PCO), the supposedly somewhat objective and brainy group that advises all
ministers on policy and finds ways for the public service to carry out the
decisions of the Cabinet. Both of these agencies are now the person tool of
Stephen Harper, and he uses them with great enthusiasm to enforce his will
throughout the government. Years ago, ministers actually headed government
departments. Now they are figureheads, and they can’t hire or fire their deputies
or the chiefs of staff that run ministerial offices. The deputies and the
chiefs of staff owe their jobs to the Prime Minister. So government departments
really aren’t really answerable to elected MPs serving as cabinet ministers,
and the ministers are no longer answerable to Parliament. The days when
ministers would quit, and possibly end their political careers because of major
blunders or corruption in their departments are now far in the past. And it
makes some sense. Why accept blame for something that really is out of your
control, especially when someone else will get the credit when things go well?

So
what’s the point of the Harper government? Like the men who were the previous
two tenants of 24 Sussex, it’s difficult to see what great, driving impulse
motivates this government. Some Prime Ministers come into office with goals,
like John A. Macdonald’s nation-building, Pierre Trudeau’s constitution and
Brian Mulroney’s trade deals and his attempts to defuse, or, at least,
re-channel Quebec nationalism. Harper’s critics used to accuse him of having a
hidden political agenda to remake the social fabric of Canada and get rid of
abortion rights, non-white immigration and other things that didn’t sit well
with rural Canada and many Christian fundamentalists. But Harper has refused to
go anywhere near the abortion issue. Immigration patterns have not changed and
the number of people coming to Canada has stayed impressively high, even during
recession years when the Harper government could have easily argued that
reducing immigration would protect Canadian workers from competition. The “hidden
agenda,” for the most part, has stayed hidden, and, unless Harper radically changes
his government priorities, he’ll be taking that hidden agenda with him when he leaves.

That’s
not to say there hasn’t been a Harper revolution. It exists, but, except for
environmentalists, few people saw where it would break out. First, the Prime
Minister has tried to muzzle and delegitimize all criticism to a frightening
degree. That’s been done quietly and incrementally, with few people, especially
outside Ottawa, noticing. Taken in the bits and pieces that you see in the
news, it all seems like inside baseball. In fact, it’s really the biggest
assault on liberty and democracy since Pierre Trudeau imposed the War Measures
Act, but, unlike Trudeau’s emergency law supposedly aimed at terrorists, these
changes are meant to change the way this country is governed and will keep Canadians
very far removed from the government that they supposedly own.

Harper
is also intent on changing the way Canadians see their own country. He once
said Canadians would not recognize the country after he was finished with it,
and he’s done a lot to make sure that they do see it in a different light: as
an energy and resource superpower instead of a country of factories and
businesses; as a warrior nation instead of a peacekeeper; as an arctic nation
instead of clusters of cities along the American border; as a country of
self-reliant entrepreneurs instead of a nation that shares among its people and
its regions.

To
remake Canada into that kind of country, you have to change the way Canadians think
about themselves, their country and the way they are governed. You have to
lobotomize a large part of the country’s cultural memory by trashing archives
and re-making museums and replace it with stories of a “warrior nation.” You
have to limit public debate by preventing the people from being able to argue
knowledgeably about important issues like the safety of the oil sands and
whether Canada should be a country that fights wars or tries to end them. You
have to keep federal experts, who still command the public’s respect, from
saying anything you don’t want to hear. You stop people from listening to your
critics by maligning the motives of journalists, opposition politicians, and
activists of every stripe.

You
run election campaigns that are just a series of staged events, with media
allowed to film you but not ask questions, and keep ordinary Canadians far away.
You hold cabinet meetings at secret times and hidden locations, and make sure
reporters don’t get many chances to ask ministers questions. When ministers are
cornered, you demand that they repeat talking points, no matter how incredibly
stupid they may sound.

You
deny that the scrutiny of journalists has any role or value to democracy and
the governance of Canada. You facilitate the creation of arm’s length
sycophantic attack media, both “mainstream” and in the “blogosphere,” to handle
low-road messaging, float trial balloons and appeal to the most prejudiced and nasty
opinions of your “base.”

You
get rid of objective data from the census and from scientists so no one can
challenge your narrative on crime, the environmental damage caused by resource
exploitation, climate change and anything else that’s complex. You create bogus
think-tanks and pressure groups to push for “ethical oil” and trash your “enemies,”
who, in your world, include First Nations people, students, journalists, pacifists
and scientists. When that doesn’t work, you send the federal tax department in
to threaten the charitable status of the organizations that you don’t like.

You
destroy Parliament’s ability to scrutinize new laws and the way the government
taxes and spends. You cloak decision-making in secrecy. You spend billions to
beef up intelligence agencies and get rid of meaningful oversight, to the point
of hiring criminals and lobbyists to be the public’s watchdogs of the domestic
spy agency CSIS.

And
you always stay on the attack. The election campaign must never stop. People
must be diverted by the struggle for power and should not spend time and energy
examining how they’re actually governed.

The
people who create and enforce your will have to be utterly loyal and, very
often, ruthless. They have to be willing to kill the messengers so that there’s
only one message – yours – that will be heard. In the end, if all goes your
way, the government and the country itself will belong to people who we thought
are elected to represent, not to dictate. And if anyone thinks a new regime,
whether a different Conservative prime minister or an NDP or Liberal
government, will roll back this revolution, they’re dreaming.

If
Harper does succeed, he’ll have created a new way of ruling Canada, one that
will make it much easier for the next leader of the country to ignore what’s
left of democracy in this country and impose his or her version of Harper’s
revolution on Canada. And there won’t be much anyone can do about it. We’re not
about to start holding our rulers to the same kind of account that Charles I
faced when he tried to trash the rights of Parliament so long ago. That is,
unless people demand better from everyone in Ottawa who plays a role in our
democracy.

[i] The Ignatieff quotes are from John
Ibbitson, “Michael Ignatieff’s timely warning on the politics of fascism.” The Globe and Mail, Oct. 30, 2012.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Ina truly bizarre column published in the Globe and Mail during
the 2013 Christmas season, Preston Manning tried to blame the Parliamentary
Press Gallery for the Senate mess. Manning got his hands on a copy of the
gallery’s small handbook, which mostly instructs new Hill reporters about
things like parking policies and where pictures can be taken. Manning seized on
the rule that a journalist can be expelled from the gallery if “such member uses his membership or the facilities of the
Gallery to obtain a benefit other than by journalism …” Duffy, Manning said,
had been lobbying for the Red Chamber for many years before Harper put the
broadcaster (along with Pamela Wallin, who had been a member of the press
gallery in the late 1980s) into the Senate. So, in Manning’s world, the press
gallery should somehow have stopped Duffy.

Manning ignored several key facts. The most glaring
one was that, while Duffy did make his availability known to various prime
ministers, both Tory and Liberal, craving a Senate seat is hardly unethical or
cause for firing from any job. (Manning’s own father had been appointed to the
Senate). The other hole in Manning’s argument was that somehow Duffy had used
the Press Gallery’s resources to win the job. The only “resource” of any value
that Duffy may have co-opted was his job as a host on CTV NewsNet, since it was
that employment that put him face-to-face with politicians. It was up to CTV,
not the press gallery, to discipline its employees if they crossed the company’s
ethical policies.

Manning, who certainly knew more facts about
Senate appointments than he let on, was certainly aware that journalists had
been appointed to the Senate since Confederation and some had served with
distinction. Globe and Mail editor Richard Doyle had been appointed by Brian
Mulroney and became one of the hardest-working legislators in the chamber. As members
of the Senate’s justice committee, Doyle and Senator Gerard Beaudoin, the
former dean of the University of Ottawa law school, had scoured legislation
that normally would have been rubber-stamped by the Senate and found many
foul-ups and bad law. Jean Chretien had appointed, among other journalists,
Joan Fraser, who had been pushed out of her job as editor of the Montreal Gazette
because Conrad Black, who owned the paper, thought she was too liberal.

Manning was trying to somehow make the Press
Gallery “wear” the Duffy scandal, as though the Press Gallery could somehow bar
one of its members from accepting a Senate seat or prevent one from being
offered. In the real world, it’s probably a bad idea for journalists to leap from
the media into any kind of government service. It may be profitable for the
journalist, but it is likely hurts the press gallery or any other association
of journalists to be a steno pool for people looking for more secure or
better-paying work.

But while Duffy and Wallin were members of the
Press Gallery, they had the backing of their employers, were popular with their
colleagues, and had, unlike most Hill journalists, they had fans across the
country. Duffy made a lot of money on the paid speakers’ circuit, and, when he
was appointed to the Senate, he simply continued that work to raise money for
the Tories. In the Press Gallery, he had a reputation as an honest man. The
2013 allegations of improper expenses – broken by members of the Press Gallery
-- were surprising to many journalists who knew Duffy. Author Stevie Cameron
described him, during the Mulroney years, as one of the gallery’s few stars
and, in a piece of prophecy that would turn to irony, wrote that none of Duffy’s
colleagues would be surprised or dismayed if he was appointed to the Senate. Duffy
was a gregarious man, much more friendly and generous with his time than most
high-profile TV journalists, many of whom are outright snobs. I worked near him
for many years and found him to be interesting, friendly and considerate. I
visited him at his Prince Edward Island home in the summer of 2009 and found
the Senate had not changed his personality, though he was more sharply
partisan. I also defended him on the Internet when trolls tried to smear him.
Like many of his friends, I felt shock, pity and sadness when details of the Senate
scandal emerged.

In his Globe piece, Manning told Globe readers: “It
is in their (the press gallery’s) interests especially that action be taken by
the gallery to ensure that their reputations and the reputation of their
institution are not unjustly tarnished by the unethical behaviour of the few.”
But what was this behavior? Impressing and befriending politicians? Being
ideologically in sync with the government? Letting or encouraging a prime
minister come to the conclusion that you’d accept a Senate seat? And just how
would journalists enforce this on their peers? Yank their credentials and bar
them from Parliament Hill for seeming a tad too friendly to politicians? At any
given time, there are journalists, many of them paid to write their opinion,
who agree with the Liberals, the Tories, the NDP, or the Greens. If we were to
audit enough consciences and put windows into some souls, we probably would
find a few who agree with some very fringy ideologies. And it will stay that
way as long as Canada is a free country.

Manning might have dropped into the Prime Minister’s
office and asked, say, Harper’s speechwriters about the ethics of moving from
media into political service. Some had been press gallery members. One had been
the editor of the Ottawa Citizen. Yes,
Ottawa is an incestuous little place, whether the Tories or the Liberals are in
power. But blaming Mike Duffy’s colleagues in the media for the senator’s
supposed transgressions is absurd. Stephen Harper had appointed Duffy, Wallin,
and Brazeau to the Senate. (Jean Chretien had appointed Mac Harb, the fourth
senator caught in the 2013 scandal.) Conservative senators had tried to control
the damage of the Brazeau, Duffy and Wallin allegations. Stephen Harper’s
office had been involved in what may well prove to be obstruction of justice. His
staffers, and perhaps the Prime Minister himself, had lied to Parliament and
the Canadian people. No one in the press gallery had made Harper and his team
make those choices. Manning’s weird column was just a sad attempt to blow smoke
and shift blame. Members of the Press Gallery have many faults and have committed
many sins, but appointing Mike Duffy to the Senate, fiddling with his expense
accounts and arranging a cover-up are not among them

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

In his 2012 book What We talk About When We Talk About War,Noah Richler analyzed the re-making of Canada
into a “warrior nation.” He described the hyping of the “Vimy Myth,” the idea
that Canada was forged on a World War I battlefield when, for the first time,
all of the Canadian contingent fought together and took a hill defended by
well-entrenched, determined German soldiers. Propaganda from the time doesn’t
fit with the Vimy Myth. Canadians, even in the Second World War, were portrayed
as junior partners of the British Empire. And it’s arguable that Canada showed
its first signs of independence during the Chanak Crisis, when, for the first
time, the Canadian government said no to
a British request for troops. But no matter. Vimy symbolizes glorious
sacrifice, not independence. It’s about strength. And it ascribes some sort of
meaning to a war that, especially after the passing of a century, seems like such
an utter waste of blood and money.[i] But the Vimy Myth is
really an antidote to the Liberal-era worship of peacekeeping and peacemaking.

Richler attributed the
phrase to former Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier, an officer who was
never mistaken for a social worker. He coined in 2007 and used before the
Conference of Defence Associations and on the speaking circuit. The phrase was
so catchy that Hillier used it in his 2010 book Leadership: 50 Points of Wisdom
for Today’s Leaders. Hillier used Vimy as a sort of magic moment in which Canadian
soldiers perform admirably and Canada’s wartime officer corps, so often trashed
by the British in both world wars, shone. After Vimy, Canadians had a seat at
the big war conferences and got to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which
formerly ended that war (and set the stage for the next one). Vimy, Richler
said, was used by Hillier to create a model for the new, fighting Canadian
Forces that had previously “meandered aimlessly, perceived as essentially just
another department of government.” So it really wasn’t independence that
Canadians were fighting for. It was international influence. And that influence
had to be paid for constantly. Canada had made that payment in the Second World
War but in the post-war years had failed to pull its weight in the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization. While liberals liked peacekeeping, being part of
international missions to dangerous places like the Balkans in the 1990s made
no impression on our allies or enemies. The country needed a fighting force, especially
after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when Canada went to war in
Afghanistan. ( Richler 70-71)

The Vimy Myth, as Richler points
out, was one of the cornerstones of a new “warrior nation” Canadian self-image.
One of the best examples of this mythology finding its way into the arts was the
2007 movie Passchendaele, filmed in Alberta in 2007. It was a remarkable film
that won several Canadian awards. The film gathered up and re-used First World
War mythology, including a variation of the story of “the crucified Canadian,”
a story that motivated many Canadian units to stop taking prisoners on the
Western Front. In the culminating scene
in the movie Sgt. Michael Dunne (played by writer-producer Paul Gross) dies
after saving a man who had been flung by an exploding shell onto a cross of
debris erected in No Man’s land. Dunne drags the injured man back to the Canadian
lines as German soldiers watch in silence, their rifles and machine guns stilled.
(In the wartime myth, a Canadian was spiked to a barn door with bayonets by
leering German sadists. The story cropped up in both world wars and was
believed by many Canadian soldiers. The Dominion-Historica
Institute used the film as a teaching aid, issuing material to go along with
the film as part of its “Passchendaele in the Classroom.” “Of all the Allies,
the Canadians were the most feared,” Gross write in it, repeating the popular
view that the war represented the country’s “coming of age” and that “our
notion of what it means to be Canadian was forged in the crucible of the
Western Front.” Gross received an Order of Canada soon after the Passchenaele
project. (Richler 86.) The conservative Canadian military clique, with its
media boosters like Jack Granatstein and Mark Steyn, is a formidable group, as
journalists who have crossed them have learned at great cost and pain. Yet in
Britain and Germany, historians abandoned the myth of a heroic First World War
long ago and the United States pretty much ignores the entire conflict as a
sort of military-political train wreck.

Canada clings to it because the
country’s leaders believe it needs war heroes. After Canadians began fighting
in Afghanistan, journalists set out to make two groups of heroes. One group was
the journalists themselves, who tried to be as swashbuckling as the great 19th
Century colonial correspondents who filed from that same nasty little corner of
the world. The other heroes were the dead. Using the same propaganda constructs
that Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Northcliffe used so well for the British in the
First World War, the dead were not – as confidential military reports of the
First World War called them – “wastage.” And they were not “killed.” They made “sacrifices.”
The Highway of Heroes, the stretch of Highway 401 in southern Ontario leading
from the big air base at Trenton to the media capital of Toronto, was re-named “the
Highway of Heroes,” and people stood on bridges over the highway not to see the
triumphant return of the living but to wave to the dead. Richler examined
then-Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford’s rephrasing of Capt. Nichola
Goddard’s death in Afghanistan as “heroic” rather than “tragic”: “Her death,
wrote Batchford in May 2006 was “not a
tragedy at all [but] an honourable
death, a soldier’s death, in the service of her country and of another,
Afghanistan, she had come to admire and love.” There could be no question of this new
definition of heroics. (Richler 204-205). There would be no decoration
ceremonies to remind the Canadian people of killing. Instead, the government
wanted people to see each dead soldier as a sort of payment for our nationhood.

A new war museum opened in Ottawa,
mainly because of the lobbying of Granatstein. The new road built beside it was,
of course, called Vimy Place. The museum’s tone was upbeat up-beat about war. Canada’s peacekeeping, and the idea of peace
and loss itself, was kept down to a dull roar. There is little in the museum to
suggest war causes actual death and maiming: almost no mention of military
medicine, for instance. There’s virtually nothing about displaced people (who
made up such a large group of Canadian immigrants) or of domestic opposition to
any war.

At the
same time, the Vimy Myth crowd went to work to dismantle what was left of the
country’s self-image as a peacekeeper. Sean Maloney, a professor at professor
at Kingston’s Royal Military attacked Canada’ss “feel goodism” and the “hollow
façade” of peacekeeping’s “myth-making exercise.” Canada may have been involved
in peacekeeping for years and had even built a now-ignored monument to it
within sight of Parliament Hill, but what Canada really needed to do to be a
real power was to link itself to the hard power of NATO (Richler 67) The
attacks of 9-11 helped move that along. The Canadian Forces began recruiting
infantry, changing its ads to focus on combat rather than on peacekeeping and
learning trades and leadership.

[i] For
the best study of the re-making of war memory, see Vance, Jonathan, Death So
Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (1997).

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

I made these notes after crunching numbers in Martin P. Wattenberg, Is
Voting for Young People? (Third Edition). New York: Pearson, 2012. The numbers in brackets are page numbers.

Newspapers were in decline long before the Internet came
along. In 1957, 76 per cent of Americans read a newspaper every day. Twenty
years later, that number had dropped to 63 per cent. The number hovered just above
50 per cent through the 1980s and early 1990s. Readership finally, permanently,
dropped below half in 1996 – still in the pre-Internet age for most people --
and touched bottom at 37 per cent in 2000, when high speed Internet started
becoming fairly easily accessible in cities, but only for desktops and laptops.
There was a bit of a dead cat bounce through the 2000s, but the
reality is that modern newspapers had lost half their readers before news web sites
became available to most people. Smart phones, iPads,
facebook, twitter and easily accessible free wireless didn’t kill newspapers.
They were already dead. (11) The Internet could be blamed by newspaper editors
and publishers to cover up years of poor management and disastrous leveraged
buyouts that were usually paid for with newsroom jobs and local coverage. In
fact, if the Internet hadn’t come along, most newspapers would have had to do
some serious soul-searching to determine why their readers had abandoned them,
or, to be more accurate, had never acquired the habit of reading them. For example, in the first four years of this
century, just 19 per cent of Canadians aged 23 to 31 read a newspaper every day. But older people were still buying them. In the same years, 72 per cent of people in their late 60s and early 70s were
regular newspaper readers.(13) People weren’t walking away from newspapers.
They had never read them in the first place. And young people had abandoned newspapers before the arrival of the Internet. In the early 1980s, 59 per cent of people
between the ages of 18 and 29 read newspapers. That’s 20 per cent more than all
of the people who read them now. (And Canadians were always miles behind the Swedes, with 90
per cent of Swedes in the 18-29 age group being regular newspaper readers in the early '80s. (Some 96 percent of
Swedish seniors read them). By the early years of the 2000s, the figure for
young Swedes was down to 37 per cent.) The problem was not just confined to Canada. The newspaper, throughout the developed world, went into a death spiral when Pierre Trudeau was still working on the Constitution and Gerald Ford was president of the United States.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Yes, it did happen here. And I spent the morning writing a bit about the Bloody Assizes in Ancaster, Ontario, in 1814 when eight "traitors" -- actually mostly gripers and some criminals, and one actual spy -- were hanged in an execution that was so badly botched that one of the spectators was killed by a falling beam. The convicts were then disemboweled, their bodies were chopped into quarters and their heads were cut off and stuck on stakes.
It's part of a chapter I'm doing in Kill the Messengers on commemoration of the War of 1812 as "Canada's War of Independence."
While I knew the medieval sentence was passed in Canada in colonial times -- the last that I know of was in 1838, and commuted -- I didn't know it had actually been performed.

I suspect there are no plans to commemorate the Bloody Assizes of Ancaster in any forthcoming Heritage Minutes.